Nude protests and political contradictions

Femen’s
April 4 protests in response to death threats against Tunisian nude blogger
Amina Tyler have prompted much debate.
How do we reconcile the need to defend free expression with the
ambiguities of using nude women to market feminism?

Femen was
founded
in 2006 by three young women who wanted to oppose the rise of sex
tourism in Kiev and decided to do so naked. On their first
demonstration, they wrote slogans on their bare backs and nobody was
interested. At the suggestion of a photographer, they wrote the
slogans on their breasts, and the rest is history. Moving from the
Ukrainian to the global, the "sextremists" have
since demonstrated against FGM, Berlusconi, Putin, the G8,
Lukachenko, and the Pope, with slogans like "Fuck
your morals" written
on their bare breasts. Photos of these demonstrations are proudly
mounted on their website.
In the age of Facebook, it was inevitable that their example would
reach young women beyond the Ukraine.

Artist Bassem Yousri referencesAlia's photo. All Rights Reserved.In
November, 2011, as pre-election violence spread in Egypt, the youth
movement and opposition were angry and fragmenting, and the Muslim
Brotherhood looked likely to win a majority in parliament, Alia
ah-Mahdi, an Egyptian college student and blogger, uploaded a picture
of herself, naked except for long black stockings, as a protest
against patriarchy and the sexual objectification of women. She was
immediately denounced not only by Islamists but by virtually the
entire
opposition, including women’s and secularist groups, some of
whom feared that Alia’s actions would hold the women’s movement
back for decades. After repeated death threats, Alia left Egypt and
ended up in Sweden where she ran into Femen last December and joined
them for a joint protest called Apocalypse
of Muhammed, in which she wrote on her nude body, "Sharia
is not a constitution."

As Maya
Mikdashi pointed out, Alia’s protest was in a context of
searing sexual harassment and violence. “The idea that female
bodies are sacrosanct, and that somehow they are “protected” from
overt sexualization in Egypt is false. Contrary to what many of
Alia’s detractors and what many commentators on the Arab world have
said, female bodies have long been the site of struggle,
interrogation, harassment, and commodification throughout the region.
In particular, Cairo is famous for being the premiere public
ass-pinching, breast-grabbing, and body-rubbing capital of the Arab
world. ... In recent months, females involved in protests at Tahrir
Square were subjected to “virginity tests” by the military
junta. The “virginity tests” were administered via the
age-old method of inserting two (male soldiers') fingers into each
woman's vagina.”

Amina's photographSocial
progress is also stalemated in Tunisia, where the Muslim Brotherhood
party Ennadha controls the state but has yet to address the economic
problems that started the revolution against ben Ali, and has been
unwilling or unable to protect the rights of citizens against
rampaging Salafis. Last month Amina Tyler, a 19 year old Tunisian,
wrote Femen asking how to join, and they told her to post a naked
photo of herself online. She posted two. In one, she is wearing lots
of makeup, holding a book and a cigarette—with a bandaged wrist.
Painted on her breasts in Arabic are the words, "My
body belongs to me and is not the source of anyone’s honor." In
the other she has no makeup, is giving the world the finger with both
hands, and wearing the Femen slogan, "Fuck
Your Morals."

The
Salafis responded predictably; Adel
Almi, head of the Tunisian Commission for the Protection of
Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said, “The
young lady should be punished according to sharia, with 80 to 100
lashes, but[because of]the
severity of the act she has committed, she deserves be stoned to
death”. He added: “Her
act could bring about an epidemic. It could be contagious and give
ideas to other women.”

As before,
while the Western press eagerly seized on the story and Amina got
international support from secularists and feminists, including a
petition with almost 100,000 signatures, the Tunisian left and
women’s movement distanced themselves, saying her protest was
un-strategic, culturally inappropriate, and harmful. But it must also be said that such youth protests are a
response to increasing Salafi pressure to make women cover more and
more of their bodies—headscarf, niqab, burqa, gloves; nothing seems
to be enough; the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the
Prevention of Vice is even considering forcing women to cover
their eyes, at least if they are "tempting" ones.

At first Amina gave interviews, On March 28th, she told Italian reporter Frederica
Tourn that she feared being arrested and raped by police but
“nothing they could do would be worse than what already happens
here to women, the way women are forced to live every day. Ever
since we are small they tell us to be calm, to behave well, to dress
a certain way, everything to find a husband. We must also study to be
able to marry, because young guys today want a woman who works.”
Then she disappeared from public sight, with many rumors in the
French press that she had been put into a mental hospital. In fact,
she was with her family. She reappeared briefly on April 6, when she gave an interview
to French
Canal TV in which she said she was afraid for her own life and
the lives of her family and knew that she would have to leave
Tunisia, but would hold fast to her Femen principles until she was eighty.

But being safe and being with one's family are not always the same thing. On April 15, Amina managed to escape from her family and tell the
real story in a skype
interview with Inna Shevchenko of Femen. She had been sitting in a
cafe in Tunis when her cousin suddenly appeared, threw her to the
ground, then dragged her away. Her uncle and cousin took her to
their house, where they beat her and her cousin broke her
sim card so she couldn’t use her phone. Her father came and took
her to her grandmother’s house, where two old women subjected her
to a forced virginity test. She stayed there for days, being
lectured on morals and forced to read the Koran even though she is an
atheist. An imam told her that she had been bewitched, so they put the Koran
on top of her head and read verses from it and took her to see him
every day. They then took her to an isolated village where she
stayed for two weeks under heavy sedation; she had no internet access
and was not allowed to contact her friends and does not remember
everything that happened during that time. Finally she escaped. She
now plans to leave for France, but not until she does another nude
protest to continue the struggle in Tunisia.

Whatever one may feel about nude protests, one must respect such courage, and, in the new post-dictatorship countries of the middle east, it is critical to defend the right of free expression. If Tunisia is indeed a democracy, Amina should be able to express herself without being subjected to death threats or familial kidnapping, even if many find her expression obnoxious or disgraceful. Liberals and feminists who feel she has gone too far should calculate the price of backing away from her as well as the price of defending her. Though defense of Amina's right to free expression would undoubtedly bring condemnation from Salafis and Ennadha, failing to defend this right can only strengthen the claim of conservatives that they and they alone should decide what is permissable expression. The stronger their claim, the more precarious will be the right to free expression of anyone who opposes them.

It is also
clear that Femen’s naked protests have struck a chord in places
where women’s bodies are a major site of political contestation.
Does Amina’s body belong to her, does it belong to her family, or
is it the symbol of a reborn Islamist state whose purity must be not
be defiled?

My
question is: how will Femen take responsibility for what happens when
young women like Alia and Amina take up the cause in contexts more
dangerous than Paris? Does Femen have the resources, knowhow, and
committment to move people from country to country, get them jobs and
papers, and give them longterm help if they must go into permanent
exile? If it is to be real, international solidarity must mean more
than petitions and protests.

In terms
of messaging, Femen’s protests are full of ambiguites and
contradictions. How does stripping fight sexism? Is marketing
feminism with women’s bodies really different from marketing
anything else? French fashion photographer Fred Meylan has just done
a photo
shoot using Femen-style naked blondes with slogans to market
jewelry by Fabergéand
Cartier—and Femen has posted the pictures on their tumblr page.

The
verbal
message
is both grandiose and incoherent: “FEMEN - is the new Amazons,
capable to undermine the foundations of the patriarchal world by
their intellect, sex, agility, make disorder, bring neurosis and
panic to the men's world. FEMEN – is the ability to feel the
problems of the world, beat it with the naked truth and bare nerve.
FEMEN – is a hot boobs, a cool head and clean hands. Be FEMEN -
means to mobilize every cell of your body on a relentless struggle
against centuries of slavery of women!”

Femen
is also anti-intellectual in a way that will not help young students
like Amina. One of their leaders, Inna Shevchenko, told the Guardian,
“Classical feminism is like an old sick lady that doesn't work any
more. It's stuck in the world of conferences and books. We have the
same ideas as the classical feminists, what is different is the form
of fight. We fight in a way that will attract young women to the
ideology again.” Okay, Inna, so the rest of us are old has-beens
but couldn’t you at least tell young people they need to read a
history book now and then?

PETA advertFemen
is not the first group to confuse individual self-expression,
marketing, and getting their pictures in the paper with effective
organizing. PETA has been having models strip down for years to
encourage people to stop wearing fur or stop eating meat. But at the
end of the day, is this what comes across? What do you remember
after looking at this ad?

A media
action is not a mass movement and female nakedness is more powerful
when it is not marketing but an expression of mass popular contempt.
It is used that way in many
parts of Africa, as in the Niger Delta women’s protest of 2002,
celebrated in the film The
Naked Option, which shows how 600 Niger Delta women of all ages
took over the largest oil producing facilitiy in Nigeria and stopped
the production of 500,000 barrels of oil per day by threatening to
strip naked in public and thus shame the men who ran the company and
their families. A similar “bare buttocks” women’s protest took
place in Swaziland in 2000 to protest evictions by the king’s
brother.

Personally,
if somebody has to be unclothed, I think women will gain more power
by exposing "the
nakedness of the fathers"
than our own. That is what another Tunisian blogger, Monica, did in
a
poem to
Ennadha where she says (my translation) “you are unveiled”:

You are unveiled: your models are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran,
Kuwait, Bahrein, Sudan: lands that horrify all humanity. Your models
are religious despots and their cliques, who take for themselves all
the country’s resources...

You are unveiled: the capital of sympathy you got from being
oppressed in the past is no more. The people see you for what you
are. You are naked...

Ennadha
and its political allies: when you sent your troops to terrorize the
streets, hurl abuse, rob and assassinate, you made your last stand.
You have lost. You are unveiled.

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